I can confidently say that I literally never participated in a Teams call that didn't have audio issues to the point of some people being unintelligible, even if audio with the same people but different conferencing works just fine.

Last year I have regularly had calls with participants from US, Italy, Finland and Australia. Never had any issues so go figure...

With audio I can't say I had problems on Teams but there are a lot of things that are poorly designed and there's very little hope for an upgrades

My company has completed Teams voice implementations at multiple orgs. Obviously the endpoints and ISPs factor in, so there are many variables. Having good Internet service for team members (however a company wants to provide/subsidize that) is key, keeping latency and jitter under control is key, along with prioritizing traffic on the LAN (or obviously WAN if you can - e.g. MPLS). People try to skip that last step a lot but it makes or breaks a good implementation. IME, Teams voice is fundamentally a stable phone system if the network conditions allow it to be. It's hard to transplant to a random employee's home or a hotel ballroom unless you have some assurance of the service quality there (hotel internet not prioritizing, kids gaming while mom is trying to run calls all off the crap ISP router, etc).

Interesting perspective. Of course, these days virtually everyone uses Teams from their home office. The issues you mention makes Teams more like a SIP PBX (special care & attention required from the networks people; hypothetically could, but won't, work over Internet or VPN) and less like a conferencing tool.

While most have no problems, managing service perception requires addressing the few that do. You can wing it and say yeah everyone has broadband so they should be fine, and the office has mass b/w on a DIA circuit so should be fine, but when things aren't fine these are the elements we look at. Teams has been a solid voice platform thus far for our customers - speaking on basis of comparing to other customers using other cloud PBX solutions, and has a lot of benefits when customer is already invested in MS land.

Statistically speaking have you considered that your connection or hardware might have been the issue?

I've been using Teams for years, and though I had an issue on a call with one guy the other day, otherwise I'm in at least one meeting with ~5+ folk daily and it works consistently.

I have gigabit fibre and an NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti.

Teams still can't keep up with my 720p webcam without the preview dropping to 15fps and lagging so badly that I get distracted by the delay between my motions and the movement of my preview in the corner.

In 2020, six months into a pandemic where everyone is working from home and Microsoft's highest priority ought to be on their video conferencing collaboration tool -- but clearly isn't -- is fucking nuts.

Oh, and speaking of the audio, Teams really ought to get decent noise removal, echo cancellation, and/or automatic muting.

> speaking of the audio, Teams really ought to get decent noise removal, echo cancellation, and/or automatic muting.

This covers any/all products and is black magic:

https://krisp.ai

As for quality of meetings, just some counter anecdata...

We moved a many thousand person enterprise across dozens of offices into Teams. The business in question is a meetingful culture, all day every day, and for the most part do not experience the issues you describe.

The issues we do see tend to be (a) echo cancellation from participants who connect from a device and a telephone simultaneously and leave audio turned on on both, (b) consistently the same humans from the same locations, who have similar quality problems on Zoom or WebEx, suggesting what the common element may be.

Worse than teams is Skype Business even worse is something called Yammer. But I share the opinion that Microsoft Teams is poorly designed. I frequently get confused as to where to find something, it is slow and buggy. Post pandemic this has been our main communication tool. But one cannot expect much from Microsoft. Sometimes they do luck out with a good product and that is rare and it doesn't last, they eventually cripple everything.